Good morning! I skipped my last send because I was visiting one of my best friends in the entire world in her new home. Rather than force something to send ahead of my trip, I figured I’d let life do its thing—ie: spend a week off the grid, drink good coffee, read good books, enjoy great conversation, and see what I want to write about after that.

I wholeheartedly intended to send this on Wednesday to get back to regularly scheduled programming, but jet lag won the battle. Hopefully this spruces up your Thursday afternoon inbox a touch.

“Just make sure you live your big, selfish life first.” Kenna, my circa 2017-2020 boss-turned-present-day-mentor, told me with her hand around a glass of red wine. She swirled the glass gently as she spoke to me, in the way someone does when they’re either teetering the line between buzzed and tipsy, or about to impart some lifelong wisdom on you. Fortunately, for me, it was the latter.

I was sitting at a dimly lit table at Barcelona Wine Bar in Denver. It was a summer evening in 2023: the kind where it was light outside well past 8PM and it felt like the sun would be up forever. Kenna was in town for week and reached out to get dinner, so we caught up on all things professional. Then, in the way they always do somewhere between two and three glasses of wine, our conversation turned from professional to personal.

To put it frankly, Kenna is someone I’m in awe of. She’s a genius. She was an OG at Bleacher Report when it was a teeny little sports startup, saw it through the Turner Sports/Time Warner $175M acquisition and then hopped over to take a leadership role at Turner Sports and oversee the implementation of Bleacher Report into the Turner portfolio—a portfolio that put it alongside household names like the NBA, March Madness, PGA, and UEFA Champions League, to name a few.

When shit hit the fan, Kenna got called into a meeting to straighten it out. Massive new sponsor brought on for March Madness that needed the God-Level-A-Team? Kenna was assigned to it. The first time I seriously fucked up in my entire career? I had a call with Kenna put on my calendar.

And somehow she’s one of those people who managed to have a killer personal life at the same time. She’s Canadian (why are the coolest people always Canadian?), met her husband on a backpacking trip, quit her job to travel the world for 2 years with said husband, then came back into the corporate world and landed a gig at a tiny sports startup, Bleacher Report. You know the rest.

22 year old me worshipped her. 30 year old me still does. Which explains why 28 year old me was asking her for life advice between sips of wine.

“But I just don’t get it. When does that switch flip for people? When you want those big life things: marriage, kids, to settle down in one place—not just in the abstract, but you really, really want them? Conceptually, marriage sounds great. I just don’t know if I want it in actuality. At all. When did you know?” I asked with a twinge of desperation in my voice that she surely picked up on. 

And that’s when she came in with the life advice I still think about to this day: Just make sure you live your big, selfish life first.

A saw a ski film a few weeks ago, Let My People Go Skiing, that was focused on ski culture in Alaska and how much the native Alaskans struggle with it. The narrator, Ellen Bradley, is Tlingit and struggles deeply with how much Americans coming to Alaska to ski feels like colonialism. It was one of those films that I walked away from with so much to chew on and think about, but one random tidbit stuck with me the most.

Bradley talked about how, to her, joy means something different: it means being in the right place at the right time. In the moment, I thought it was kind of a glib thing to say, to be completely honest. Joy, to me, isn’t a word with a malleable definition. And yet I spent my entire walk home from the theater thinking about it.

If joy isn’t a word with a flexible definition, which words are? How do definitions and meanings of words change throughout our lives?

Chewing on that idea on my walk home is what brought me back to that conversation with Kenna.

Over the last few months, whenever I’ve reflected on this current chapter of life, the word indulgence keeps coming up. Staying in on a Friday night and reading a book for 3 hours because I can. Going out to meet friends for “one drink” at 7PM and making my way home at 2AM. Sitting outside on an Adirondack chair during the farmers market to people watch for an hour and leaving my phone upstairs. Killing a Saturday by taking a book to the bar downstairs and reading while I sip cocktails and catch up with the bartenders. There’s something so, so beautiful about so little responsibility coupled with so few people to check in with.

In other words, for the first time ever, I actually feel like I’m living my big, selfish life.

And as I walked around Amsterdam last week, I realized indulgence is the perfect example of a word thats definition and meaning changes as we get older.

When I was younger, I would’ve told you indulgence was an expensive sweater, a really good meal, or indulging my sweet tooth with a good dessert. In this chapter of life, indulgence feels like the freedom to do whatever I want to do, become whoever I want to be, and letting my sense of self be as malleable as I want it to be.

And there I sat, pondering the idea: in a foreign country, able to wear anything I want, fill my days with whatever I want, talk to whomever, walk wherever, eat whatever, and be whoever I want to be.

I have so many friends who are new mothers. I thought about them as I traipsed around the city, double-espresso freshly coursing through my veins and tote bag in hand, aimlessly wandering between art galleries and book stores. From the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep, they think about their children, their homes, their partners, and everything that being a mother entails. It’s the ultimate act of selflessness.

When I think about my life currently: everyone I love is healthy. My job is stable. I don’t have a nagging gut feeling somewhere deep inside me telling me I’m in the wrong relationship. For the first time in so long, my mind was completely open.

My trip was indulgent in so many ways, but I realized the biggest indulgence of them all was the fact that I could walk around and think about anything I wanted all day long.

So I took advantage and spent the days walking around and letting my brain slowly untangle itself. Akin to the process I’ve talked about with backcountry skiing, once I got through the monotonous, day-to-day thoughts, I watched as bigger ideas would pop up in my mind and I’d spend entire days and city miles chewing on them.

So here are my main indulgences from the trip. The ideas that popped into my head that I decided to take for a spin and play with as I walked around.

How holy museums feel.

As I walked into the Rijksmuseum on my last day, I thought to myself: I bet this is what the Vatican feels like to a devout Catholic. I get it now.

99% of the time that I’m inside an art museum, I’m going to cry. There’s something about being in the presence of thousands of hours of work, and hundreds of different artists’ life’s work that feels so holy. It’s a place designed to zoom out and show you works across space and time. I just get hit by the number of lives that have been lived and how lucky I am to be alive and see their work.

On top of that, being somewhere like the Rijksmuseum where artists like Van Gogh himself have wandered the halls and felt inspired. Man, oh man. I could write about this for days. When I walked inside that building, I felt like my soul was vibrating. Not to go full-force-insufferable-yogi on you with “the light in me sees and honors the light in you,” but I truly felt like whatever creative DNA exists inside of me was just humming looking at all the works that came from the creative DNA before me.

And how indulgent it felt to let myself become enamored by artistic ability, history and its implications, and pure creativity.

The idea of having a “second heart” as it relates to artwork

This applies to writing stories, songs, making art, and just about anything else in between. Cheryl Strayed wrote about the idea of your creative work being a “second heart” in her Dear Sugar column, later repurposed for Tiny Beautiful Things. Here’s an excerpt I love:

There are few concepts in the world that I love more than this: that our artwork is our second heart.

Whenever I labor over a piece of writing and really, really put my heart into (like this newsletter!) and hit publish, I think to myself: there it is! My second heart! Existing out in the world.

It’s the same with artwork that I spend 15+ hours on. A commission, a random gallery piece, or whatever it may be: I spend hours and hours and hours hunched over a piece of paper until it starts to look less like a piece of paper and more like a piece of me.

Noticing how I act in foreign countries

So much to unpack with this one, but I think it ultimately boils down to just fiercely avoiding doing anything that makes me seem overtly American. On this trip, I kept noticing how much I shrink myself when I travel. I speak softer, take up less space, and just listen. I’m not saying the way I act is right, per se, but it’s objectively different than how I act in the states and it was fun to observe. Especially the quiet part.

There’s such a humility that comes with being foreign: with not knowing the language, or which way to look when crossing the street, or just being scared out of your mind to fuck up the flow of the bike lane. It’s disorienting, but in the healthiest way. It strips away certainty and just leaves awareness: how we sound, how we move, how we exist.

Maybe that’s why travel always feels so special. It makes me pay attention to myself in ways I forget to at home. And that attention feels like another kind of indulgence—not the loud, hedonistic kind, but the quiet indulgence of truly noticing your own presence in the world.

The idea of a second heart in a breakup

As I was thinking about the idea of a second heart in artwork, I thought about second hearts in love—and more specifically, breakups.

When you spend enough time with someone, they become a part of you. Their heart becomes your second heart, and maybe that’s why breakups are so acutely painful. Someone trusted you with their heart and gave it to you, and you have to forcibly remove it from yourself and hand it back, all tattered and worn.

Whether it’s carrying art or someone else’s heart, how cool that we get to carry something beyond ourselves.

When I think back on Kenna’s advice, I used to think she meant travel, or chase experiences, or say yes to the things that feel deliciously irresponsible. And maybe she did. But now, I think she meant something deeper: live the kind of life that belongs entirely to you.

A life where you know the shape of your own heart before you share it with someone else. A life where indulgence isn’t excess, but presence. Because maybe living a “big, selfish life” isn’t about taking up space, but about knowing yourself well enough to finally make room for everything else.

An extra fun one this week! My closest guy friend in the world got married and asked me to make a custom design for it. He loves music more than anyone I’ve met in my life, so instead of a guest book, he and his wife put out a concert poster at the reception for everyone to sign—designed by yours truly.

This was the best project ever for so many reasons, but the top of my list being the fact that they gave me full creative control on this one. “It’ll be way cooler for us if we look at it in 20 years and it looks like your style of art vs. if we just give you some sort of idea of what to make” they reasoned.

So my process was essentially: look up a photo of the venue and have some fun. I’m so, so, so unbelievably happy about this. Hands down my favorite wedding gift I’ve ever given.

PS: If there’s one thing about me… if you give me creative control, the final result is going to be cobalt blue.

A bonus piece of art for this edition since I took a week off and thought you all deserved a little extra treat. Here’s this masterpiece of a Reddit response. I was struggling with jumping back and forth between scenes/time periods in the essay above and looked for some tips and tricks and stumbled upon this absolute beauty.

Have I mentioned I was off the grid for a week and a half? Didn’t look at a single email or answer a single text, so I’m lacking in the snacks department, but here’s what I scrounged up once I re-entered reality.

⛷️ It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a new episode of the FIFTY+! This was probably my favorite episode ever. Watching professional skiers call off a mission based on gut feelings was something I didn’t expect, but have endless respect for.

🏔️ After watching the above episode of the FIFTY+, I had to bite the bullet and google: how the f*ck do ski crampons work? Now I know. Now you’ll know!

🎨 Bella McGoldrick launched a new collection (and a new book to boot!) all about re-discovering yourself after becoming a mother. It’s probably my favorite collection of hers yet. So much nuance, discovery, and openendedness in this one.

✈️ After spending a week in northern Europe, this episode of the Jim and Mads show made me wanna book a flight right back.

🎿 Speaking of Jim and Mads, Madison Ostergren just never misses.

❄️ Deer Valley is about to double in size with their Expanded Excellence Project. Nearly 100 new runs and 10 new lifts in the works.

👟 I really fell in love with Dutch fashion in a way I didn’t expect to: a touch tomboy, a touch gorpcore, and yet so chic. I love, love, loved this perfectly timed piece from TOGS about the bifurcation of self and how gorpcore is evolving towards nostalgia.

“Sunrises are always worth the price of admission.” - Cody Townsend

- McCall 🌻

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